kattkieru

I think the comment by 3DArtz says it all. I've seen some stuff that makes it on TV with lipsync that doesn't touch what you've got going in this clip. Not to mention the new Ninja Turtles movie (which you know I loved, and which was totally awesome) -- the lipsync in that shouldn't have made it to rendering. As always, I'm whipping a team of cheerleaders into a rooting frenzy for ya.

Heh. Six hours of cursing and almost tossing my computer out the window later, I've decided that I have no idea what's going on with this thing. I'm going to give it another go tomorrow. Poor Thom has had enough of a run through the Blades of Doom. Question: is there an easy way to expand the entire tree of bones in the model view? I tried all kinds of clicking on that plus to no avail.

Well I hope Luckbat doesn't mind me spilling a trade secret of his, but the umbrellas actually come from a tiny bodega on 54th Street in NYC. Which part of 54th is, I think, something I'll leave to you as an excercise in urban exploration. You already have all my comments man; I just wanted to chime in and shout Banzai, Banzai! here as well.

Here's an image of the new pelvis. I tried to keep hooks and five-points away from spots that'll get distorted a lot and from areas that need to be round (five point patch + bum = flat bum). [attachmentid=18598] Anyway, I won't be able to weight tonight but I'm gonna give it a go tomorrow. But I wanted to leave this up for feedback, just in case you see a spot on the model you think'll be bad for animating. My knowledge of flow comes mostly from polygons, wherein you can have five-pole points without smoothing problems, so I had to kind of hack around that loss. So lemme know what you think.

Whoa, you're totally right. I must have hit something while I was animating. Like I said above I'm still kind of a born-again newbie with the animation and the shortcut keys; I prolly hit the key for that without noticing. That'd explain some of the other weird behavior too. Lemme have a look at it tomorrow. The modeling part is no issue, but the re-assigning of CPs is something I'll have to relearn. The "geometry" bones are the only ones required for parenting of CPs, right? Or should I go through the whole installation process?

Finished off the bottom. I'm trying to keep it simple, although depending on how crazy I decide to go with textures I might decal it with drive train parts or something. [attachmentid=18566] Still only up to 1816 patches. I think I'll aim for between 2500 and 3000 total in the end, which leaves me lots of breathing room. (I don't believe it'll actually weigh in that high in the end.) I've been bouncing around on stuff because I never stay in once place for long, but I think next up might be the exhaust and spoiler. I didn't think they actually put spoilers on these things, but I'll be damned if I didn't see one while I was walking around town earlier in the week. Wish I'd had my camera. I could use advice on the axle: what do you reckon it needs? I am trying to keep it simple (streamlined, if you will), but I'd also like something that doesn't look terrible. Any suggestions?

Also keep in mind I have bad tech karma. The friend of mine who got me to buy AM a while back never has crashes. Sometimes I feel like the non-virgins in a horror movie. ; Yes, this is the installation version. Since the 13th July one started working, I dropped the 17th july one into a new project for that test (from the above zip file for v12.) The action is yours; please find a project attached. (Are actions saveable as separate files?) I'm sure the butt thing is my fault; the only actual animating I've done in AM was posing KeeKat and doing the Door tutorial, and that was something like a year ago. Hope it helps you. He's dancing to Comfortably Numb by the Scissor Sisters, if you're curious. Hey, you're the master at this, and I bow to your judgement. On the other hand, I've found that the most important part of maintaining good deformations around the leg areas is to have the leg circles flow in an arc around the crotch, one that joins both legs together. Since I'm woefully unable to explain myself verbally lately, here's what I mean visually: [attachmentid=18557] Personally I find that a circle of CPs or verts or whatever at about a 45 degree angle as the main link between leg and pelvis to be the key. Thom's legs are attached in a manner which, in my mind, almost prohibits easy movement. I'm sure you know all that, but it surprised me when I looked at Thom the first time, considering he is kind of the AM mascot, that his spline flow was so bad. And that he has no bum. Lemme know if you need any more help, though. At the moment, I have nothing but time. dancing_thom.zip

Oh, I didn't submit it as a bug; I just posted the note above. Bugs in AM are so strange that I only submit the ones I can safely, easily reproduce every time with a set bunch of operations. (Just now, I loaded the 17 July version into AM and got Exception 1, then the program crashed; I loaded up again with the same steps and it's fine.) Anyway, I don't think it's gone; I just can't get it to happen again. Since I'm not even working on a humanoid character in AM at the moment I'm going to leave it for now and come back to it when I attempt a human as my next project. It should be noted again, David, that the error only occurred on the right hand fingers; if you do go through the rig again with a fine-toothed comb, I bet you'll find some discrepancy between the setup of the right and left fingers. As a complete aside, Thom freaks me out. He has no bum. (Ignore the fact that it pops halfway through in the anim; dunno why it did that, and that's not the lack of bum I'm speaking of anyway.) dancing_thom_h264.mov

Well, it's safe to say I have no idea what's going on. I sent the above message on my fifth or sixth try to get a consistant method for locking AM. (Each time it broke at a different moment when I was moving a different bone.) On the next try I was actually able to click through all the circularity messages and save a project. Different messages each mentioned different fingers on the right hand only, if you're curious. When I reloaded the project, the problem went away and now, even following the same methods, I can't break the rig again. So sorry for the "bug report." I guess you can ignore it?

Hey David, Before I say anything else, I want to thank you for all the work you do for the community. I think it's pretty awesome of you to spend so much of your time on stuff you basically give away to the community. Now that I'm back on AM I wanted to retry your rig. The first version I downloaded was the july 17 one, which broke my v12.0w. (I got six different errors, then it crashed when I tried to delete the chor and start again.) So I downloaded the July 13th version. Two minutes into playing with Thom I got this: [attachmentid=18515] I'd save and send you the project, but every time I dismiss the message box the same one pops up in its place; after I type this I'm going to have to kill the process tree and see if I can't replicate the error. However, I thought you might like a look at the error message. edit: Yep, seems the same message pops up if you play with the hand gizmos long enough. Sorry if this has come up in the past, but I did search the thread for "circularity" and it seems nobody else has mentioned it.

Now that's interesting... You know, I might be doing that too. I have a habit of holding down keys that are connected to what I'm doing most, but I forget to let them up when I'm done. I bet I was holding down the shift key on some of the sopts I used, although I know I wasn't on the mouth. Good thing to keep in mind, though, so thanks!

Yeah... there should actually be an entire new chapter in the newbie manual about how alpha, gamma, and magnitude effect the spline look, and how you can manipulate them. I said in another section that I find it most beneficial to zero alpha and gamma and set mag to 100% before tweaking; I think that's a trick that'd help out a lot of people coming in from other programs as well. As for my modeling technique, I think that may be the problem. It usually seems to happen when I duplicate geometry, modify it, then reconnect it (although I had a few on the trunk of my car that were free-floating splines; turns out that I should have been hitting "Select Connected" instead of selecting spline loops before hiding). So what I was doing: I made a mouth from a 10-point lathed circle. I extruded the mouth out twice to form the lips. Now, instead of just extruding backwards, I copied the inner spline loop, pasted, and using extrusions I created the mouth bag. Lastly, I deleted that spline loop (leaving a bunch of free-floating ends sticking out) and tried to reconnect them to the mouth. Looking back, part of it may have been that I deleted a spline loop with hooks running *from* it *to* other patches... They kind of stayed attached anyway (even though they were rootless), then vanished afterwards with no warning. But the first time I came across this issue was when I mirrored my model by hand (Copy/Flip/Attach always borks geometry for me, so I reconnect everything manually). That time, though, using K to disconnect and then either reconnecting or drawing a new spline between the two CPs worked; those tricks didn't work this time. I fixed the model on my own and double-checked that there were no floating leftovers... But you're welcome to the mouth part. It looks pretty normal by my estimation. beetle_mouthparts.prj.zip

Wow those were some fast replies. Thanks! Near as I can tell they're not connected to anything else. I tried the Y trick first (was the first thing I thought of, actually) to no effect. Tried loading, reloading, reverting, to no effect. I'm actually done fixing the problems now; like I said, I ripped out the splines and rebuilt them from scratch, but I'd still like to know *how* the problem occurs so I can skip it next time. ; I didn't try the copy-and-paste; I generally stay away from it when patches are involved because it eats my five-point patches, and since I'm using porcelain that also means I have to go through and flip lots of normals again. But I suppose I can try that next time too. Oh, and I'm using v12.0w. Hmm... There were none with that issue here, but I found one on the back of my car that I wasn't able to solve before with that problem, so thanks on that!

Hey-ho. I have a problem that happens every so often: CPs that aren't attached to anything, ones that should only have one bias handle, have two. This makes it so that it's impossible to connect another spline to them and have the two merge into one spline. Anyway, a better explanation is the picture below. That CP has two handles. When I connect the spline to it, I get a spline and a patch that are just weird. What causes this? To fix it I'm having to rip out entire splines (at the moment this seems to be a catching problem, as deleting that one CP makes the one behind it have the same issue), and it's driving me nuts. Thanks in advance, ~ Charles

New WIP image in the attachments for this post. Visually there aren't too many differences, but I spent all day yesterday slimming down the model; we're down to 1538 patches, which I think is not too bad. The wheels took the heaviest hit, and the logos have been completely done away with for the moment. (I'll add them back just as soon as I can find my AM manual for the bit on Decals.) Tried something with the bottom, failed; gonna try again later. I lied! First, I want to say thanks again for that help on editing CP handles. I've got a system going now thanks to that and the Zettle page, and I've discovered that the most useful thing in the world for me might be a one-key command to "normalize" CP handles. By normalize, I mean set alpha and gamma to 0, and both magnitudes to 100. I found that, on the whole, every spot that was unbecoming was due to alpha or gamma being screwy. 90% of those were fixed in my eyes by normalizing the CP handles in both directions at the junctures (you know what I mean, how each CP is actually two going in the different spline directions) and then doing basic tweaks. Ahh, thanks for that. I see what you mean. Now, in one of the technotes it said there's a weight setting to adjust that behavior? And is there a reason the porcelain setting is hidden? I've found that you can add vertex averaging by editing the material files on disk directly, but not in the properties editor? Yeah, well I don't get Lindsay Lohan being in a Herbie movie either, but then again I'm old-fashioned.

Yeap, that's what I've been doing. I was hoping there was a less roundabout way, but okay. I'll deal. That wasn't what I was looking for at all; I think it's better! Thanks! Modifying alpha and gamma separately from each other and from magnitude actually is the best solution; that makes it so that you're actually moving the tangent handles along a coordinate system specific to the CP. Perfect. Yeah, I am working on that. Like I said, the above model is a veritable patch tank. At the same time, there are spots where you just can't slim something down. Those cp-heavy areas are the ones on which a smoother would be most useful. That's interesting... if you don't mind, do you have links to any examples on which you believe porcelain would, to the model's detriment, smooth over such details? I'm really keen to learn how to see when and where to use both techniques. Point. Then the lazy way it is. ; Nifty! That's definitely a step in the right direction. Once I understood from his page how he was calculating things I found that there are plenty of spots on which Zettle will be useful. However, it fails in certain places due to the usage of the reference tangent lines (which is a good trick, but only visually accurate 75% of the time). I guess manually modifying them is the only way. Knowing how those CP handles are calculated, though, is probably the best weapon I could have, so thanks!

Heya all, Long story short: my powerbook (G4 1.33GHz, 1.25 gig of ram, GeForce 5200 64 meg of video ram) died last month and I cobbled together a PC out of parts while waiting for Apple to figure out how to fix it. The PC: - GeForce 2 GTS (32 meg of video ram, AGP 1 or 2, I'm not sure) - 512 Meg of ram - 1.1 GHz athalon A friend of mine urged me to dust off my 2005 disc and try AM again on the PC, just to see, and wow! Despite being a shadow of my Mac laptop, AM *screamed* on this PC. (The funny part is that it sat caseless on my desk for a while as well, cables snaking out from the motherboard.) It's two months later and after two small modeling projects chosen by said friend to get me back into the swing of things, a bar of soap (yeah, total newbie thing) and a raygun from Space 1999, I attempted a VW beetle. I finished what I guess is a good first pass just now and thought I'd post it; check out the attachment. The total number of patches is 3698 (yes, you read that right). If I decide to actually polish this model and bring it to a more finished state I'll clean that up; most of it is due to me leaving in construction splines and geometry and stuff that can be cleaned out once I'm finished building. Lots of hooks are possible. Also, I think over a quarter of that geometry is in the wheels and VW symbols on the front and back; it was an experiment to see if I could model a logo in AM, and it seems I managed it. From a distance they'd be just fine as decals, though, on dome-ish shapes. So it's important to note that this is modeling practice, that I know there's a lot wrong with it, and that I don't much care because it was for practice. But I did have some questions, if folk are up for them. 1) Stupid newbie thing (not that I'm a newbie but I've forgotten most of what I learned before I quit): how do you easily duplicate materials? Objects too for that matter -- I'd like to be able to, in the project workspace, duplicate something and I can't for the life of me figure out how. 2) Is there some way to get AM to recognize that I'm using a wacom tablet and stylus in pen mode? It has to do with the arthritis in my right wrist. I can't use a mouse right now. Anyway, using a stylus makes certain activities harder (zooming in perspective mode, changing values in the properties window by dragging, etc). If not, I'll live with it. 3) This one's gonna get me caned, but I have to ask anyway: is there a way to constrain the motion of CP handle ends to one of the main axes, as we do with constraining CPs using 1/2/3/4/5/6? Yes, I know that mathematically they have no position in 3D space. However, user interaction with them *appears* to be in 3D space, and there are often times I want to move a CP handle, for example, down only on the X axis and find I have to zoom in and do so, etc, when if I could have held the 1 key down, I could work from any angle and any distance. 4) Speaking of bias handles, is there a way to smooth them? I know of Stephan's (sp?) absolutely brilliant plugins page (why hasn't that man been hired by Hash already? ), but his smoother doesn't do what I want. It has this habit of moving CPs, and you can only stop movement on two of three axes. I'd like to keep CPs in the same place, but smooth the handle values so that patches blend together better at edges. 5) I know about porcelain, and I'll be using it when I get around to really attempting to surface this model (PC AM's material editor works brilliantly, and 12.0w's stability, even while doing progressive renders, is *awesome*) because, quite simply, I don't understand why models would be done any other way. So here's a question: obviously porcelain was wanted by some users because if it wasn't, it wouldn't have been created. Also obviously, there's a reason why materials don't calculate as porcelain by default. So can someone explain to me the benefit of *not* using porcelain? I honestly can't understand why not averaging the normals is a Good Thing, and since someone somewhere along the line made the decision to *not* do so by default I'm sure there was a good reason. 6) Should I bother with the bottom of this car, or should I just make it black? I'm not doing a car interior, btw. I will be adding an aerial, some wipers, and more detailing. After that I have other plans. *cackles* Although since this is practice I don't know whether or not it'll get finished. Anyway, thanks for looking and for reading this far. ~ Charles

... you'll show those rebel scum! Long live the brushed-metal Empire! You have the rest of my comments already, but I didn't notice that there's "no hand movement," so whatever you were planning could probably be nixed in favor of saving some time. I agree that you could move on from here, cloak notwithstanding.

I can't imagine Thandie Newton bald, but she'd look good even in a burlap sack. I wonder if she could pull off bad-ass? I was thinking Rosario Dawson might be a better choice, but she's a little too tall. On a total side note, have you read Octavia Butler's Fledgeling? It's about a small lady vampire with dark skin and the entire time I was reading it I couldn't help imagininig Ebon running around, overlayed over top of a bunch of live actors. On to the clip. I've already told you a lot about what I think, but aside from a crack in the tiles on the wall (which I'd still like to see), I finally figured out what could make his impact read more: a camera jiggle. The camera really rocks a bit when it turns around as she's spinning to hit him, but when he hits the wall the camera's moderately still. If the camera rocked at the time of impact (pitch it left and right), and there was a good sound in there, I think it'd read really well. Incidentally, how strong, exactly, is Ebon? You still haven't given a full breakdown on that, or if you have I've forgotten. If she's strong enough to kick him into the wall like that and to have him collide with it at a decent speed, wouldn't that hit be good enough to crack his ribs or something? Oh, and because this isn't suggested enough, something in the room needs to be lit on fire. Doesn't even have to be plot related-- just have something randomly spark up. ^-^

Count me in, too. I hear v13 is all about stability, which is what I crave.

I think the video tute will still be necessary, the re-parenting of bones will just be a lot faster. Anyone unfamiliar would benefit from the video tute...let us get the installation finalized so that the tute will only have to be done once. It takes a little while to iron out the kinks. Okay then, I'll keep trying. I've wriggled my way up to the hands; once I have a better idea of how all these things go together I'll reinstall Panther and try a few takes of the video. One thing I don't get -- it says to rotate the legs to make the gray feet bones orient like the feet, but when I load your rig over the Jane model they're already aligned? I just left it as was.

Heya again, Still struggling with the rig on my end. I've been having a lot of slowdowns since I installed Tiger, but the 10.4.3 patch is killer. Nothing works any more, and Hash seems wont now to allocate basically all available virtual memory. (Not kidding here -- I just checked, and it's using 3 GIG.) I think I need to roll back to Panther. Anyway, I get 2.5 - 4 fps moving bones in your rig around, and it drops to 1fps when I'm recording the video. I don't think I can do it with this laptop. I'm sorry I made the offer. I don't know why AM is so sluggish moving bones around; even with lots of relationships in Blender or Maya my laptop holds up. Then again, since someone's already working on a plugin to do the heavy lifting maybe the video tute isn't worth it anyway. So I'll keep watching. I can't imagine what it would be like to attempt actually animating with a rig this heavy on my machine, though. I'll try again once I've reinstalled Panther; I don't know what Apple did but Tiger is just unusable with 512 meg of system ram if you're doing anything more interesting than listening to music and surfing.

David, I'm still planning on doing the installation video, but the actual installation is giving me grief as your rig brings my system to its knees. ^-^ I have some time this weekend, though, so I hope I'll be able to figure out the install and then get it all going by then. Incidentally, that PDF... that's one hell of a long page.

This was a good one, but I do have a few crits/suggestions if you'll take them: 1) The intro text -- wouldn't "fade" in tools separately from "lightweight." 2) It's not exactly obvious that he's excercising... the motion is strange for weight lifters. What about if he were doing arm-curls? 3) The putting down of the weights and the resulting spring into the air is a brilliant idea, but the anticipation that leads up to those two actions is not quite enough. I think part of the problem is that he looks away before he drops the weight, which moves his attention towards whatever's in front of him. If he kept looking at the weight until he put it down, and then his attention came to the other weight, it might be better. Also, since he's so... jell-o-y, putting down the first weight could squash him forward and then that could turn into the anticipation for the upward motion because he'd already be squashed so far forward. Am I making any sense? I hope so. I can't wait to see the next version. What are you thinking about for sound?

David, I think I can speak for everyone in that the whole community will appreciate the great lengths you've gone to, to get this rig into the hands of the average user. I mean, the months of research and tweaking you're doing now are going to save lots of people time down the line, and that's by no means a small thing. So take all the time you need. Don't rush yourself; rushing leads to mistakes, and I for one would rather you got some sleep and the rig came out a day late than the rig be out Right This Minute with a few minor issues still unfound. As for the fingers: Are multiple versions really needed? Why can't the five finger version become the 3 finger version using some sort of on/off slider chicanery? Since the fingers should all eventually be parented to the same base hand / arm / whatever bone, can't we just leave the unused fingers invisible?